Blade: Trinity

Will Frodo make it to Mount Doom? Is Gandalf…oh, wait, wrong trilogy from New Line. For the third and presumably final installment of ”Blade,” screenwriter Goyer, who also penned ”Blade” and ”Blade II” (which earned a combined $152 million), steps behind the camera to complete what he hopes could be ”the ‘Star Wars’ of vampire films,” he says, ”a whole Wagnerian epic.”

In ”Trinity,” Wesley Snipes returns as the half-vampire, half-mortal Blade, and Kris Kristofferson is back as his mentor, Whistler. To stop the vampire kingdom from taking over the world, they team with the Nightstalkers, a group of human vampire hunters led by Whistler’s illegitimate daughter (Jessica Biel) and the ruffian Hannibal King (Ryan Reynolds).

So what’s new? This one’s funny. ”It’s not ‘Airplane!’ or anything like that,” says director David S. Goyer of the roughly $60 million production. ”It vacillates between being really funny, but then in the course of a single scene, it gets dark and serious.” Also serious was Reynolds, who packed on 20 pounds of vampire-slaying muscle, thanks to a personal trainer. Says Reynolds: They ”just kicked my a– into fine cottage cheese pudding for about six months.”

WHAT’S AT STAKE Are fans willing to bite a third time around?